This is what they call journalism these days: a full-out hit piece in the New York Daily News against out SIOA religious liberty bus ads. “Pamela Geller, blogger with Tea Party ties, launches ad crusade against ‘Islamization of America,'” by Barry Paddock, Anjali Khosla Mullany and Corky Siemaszko for the New York Daily News, May 26:

A bikini-wearing blogger with Tea Party ties has placed ads on city buses aimed at outraging Muslims.

You have to hand it to the Daily News: that lead paragraph is a marvelously compact compendium of biased reporting, defamation, and outright falsehood. It is so concise and yet so loaded with slant and smear that it ought to be taught in Leftist journalism courses about how to destroy people and causes with a news story. Start with “bikini-wearing blogger”: the intent, obviously, is to lead readers to dismiss Pamela Geller as a frivolous character, someone who runs around all the time in a bikini (suddenly they discovered a puritanical streak over at the Daily News, in between photos of Angelina Jolie and Sandra Bullock), someone who is connected to (gasp!) the Tea Party movement (thereby semaphoring that she is a dangerous fringe right-winger who ought not to be taken seriously by decent liberal New Yorkers).

She is conservative, you see, and she wears a bikini, so she couldn’t possibly be up to anything worthwhile. And sure enough, the ads are “aimed at outraging Muslims.” Religious freedom? Pah. Islam’s death penalty for apostates? Never heard of it. Rifqa Bary? Who’s that? The Daily News finds it all unworthy of mention. In its world, Muslims are victims, and themselves victimize no one. People who want to leave Islam but fear death do not exist, and someone who wants to help them and defend the free conscience is just a bikini-clad wingnut.

“Fatwa on your head? Is your community or family threatening you? Leaving Islam?” read the ads bought by rabble-rouser Pamela Geller and the New York-based Stop the Islamization of America.

“Rabble-rouser”! This from New York’s Picture Newspaper, which has been rousing the rabble for decades with lurid crime-scene photos, cheesecake of the stars, and lowbrow imitations of New York Times editorials!

They also direct Muslims to a Web site urging them to leave the “falsity of Islam.”

Geller, 51, a leader in the fight against the proposed Ground Zero mosque, said she was “thrilled” that the ads were up – and doesn’t care if they offend Muslims.

“Will it bother Islamic supremacists? Yes,” she said.

Geller said she spent $10,000 – money raised by readers of her Atlas Shrugs blog – for 40 ads appearing on the sides of buses citywide for a month.

“There ought to be ads also for people who want to leave Islam,” she said. “Their lives are threatened.”

It was good of the Daily News to include this quote, but notice that they made no attempt to contact any ex-Muslims and back it up. It is presented simply as Pamela Geller’s unsupported assertion, and immediately is undercut:

Similar bus ads have run in Miami – over the objections of local Muslims, who called them a “smoke screen for hatred” – and more are planned for Detroit.

Then follows more sneering at Pamela, again with the subtext: “Liberal Daily News readers, this woman is on the other side! You must oppose what she does!”

An archconservative on the liberal upper West Side, Geller worked at the Daily News on the business side during the 1980s before moving to The New York Observer – a gig that apparently gave her access to City Hall, where she was photographed with Mayor Bloomberg.

Geller made a splash in the right-wing blogosphere four years ago by videotaping a denunciation of Palestinian terrorists – while dressed in a bathing suit and frolicking in the surf off Israel.

A year later, the racy right-winger donned another bikini to send Christmas greetings to the troops in Iraq.

“I want to thank the troops for sacrificing everything so I can be here in my bathing suit opening up my incredibly big mouth and saying exactly what I want,” she said.

Geller wears a tight-fitting Superman outfit on her blog, which is replete with attacks on Islam and unfounded claims about President Obama.

Her blog is popular with the political right, and it earned her an invitation to speak at a recent Tea Party convention in Tennessee.

Her bus ads, however, angered Muslims in Astoria, Queens, yesterday.

“I feel angry, so angry, when people want to target my religion,” said Ikraine Chemssy, 24.

“I think it’s stupid, sorry,” said Souad Azzam, 45. “You are free to believe whatever you want. If you are in it by force, you are not a real Muslim.”…

Once again — angry Muslims, but no ex-Muslims grateful that someone is coming to their defense. For the multicultural elitists of the Daily News, such people simply don’t exist.

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